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« on: March 09, 2024, 05:32:10 PM »
It had been quite a long while since I played, but i recently went through a campaign and had a lot of fun. I had been very critical over well, the entire skill system for awhile. The current skill system is a massive improvement over those early implementations, the balance is way better, the available OP points on hulls are consistent now, story points provide a nice extra path for progression. I'm still not a fan of arbitrary damage bonuses and similar but it's not really a problem in the current balance i dont think.
However, i want to attempt an another appeal at tweaking the balance between combat and fleet skills. I have a lot of fun piloting my ship, my favorite being the odyssey (since apogee seems to have gotten a couple redesigns and doesn't really play well as a flagship anymore). Even piloting well, it usually feels much better to get a skill that benefits the whole fleet rather than only your flagship. If it were designed such that it was a power transfer between your flagship or your fleet, a choice between a single strongly buffed ship or many weaker ships, classic narrow and tall or wide and short, it would be fine. But instead of wide and short, it's wide and short but with a big power dip right where the player's ship in the fleet is.
As is, if you do not put a lot of points into combat, then it feels like everyone in your fleet except you gets to have a fun, competent ship. All your officered ships get to bleed off hard flux, have higher top speed, get more plasma burns, get extra flux, deal more damage, higher peak operating time, etc, except the one you're flying, because screw you, player. This blatantly sucks, why am i jealous of my own NPCs, alex! I suggest allowing the player to put an AI officer for skills on their own ship or otherwise be able to use the skills of an officered ship when in control of it.
Thinking about the kind of player who will want to specialize into the command style or who doesn't want to command a ship or isnt entirely comfortable with it, they might not be confident in controlling their ship manually. The very last thing a player who isn't confident in controlling ships manually needs is to be further discouraged from piloting! The knowledge that just by taking control of a ship the shields will get weaker, guns will do less damage, etc is a huge discouragement to players from engaging more with piloting. As an aside, the big 5-6 ordo kill fleets i see don't involve player piloting either, so at current it seems "Optimal" to not pilot your ships at all, which isn't very fun...
I think, if it became possible to put an officer on your flagship right now, it would certainly break the game's balance. If you could always use an officer for your flagship's combat skills, then even extra elite skills the player would be able to use would typically not be worth it compared to having a rank 6 or 7 officer then the player simply putting 5 more points into leadership (one of those points will give extra officers too, which would end up offsetting the officer you'd otherwise be losing by putting into your own ship. But it's not a balance change that would be incredibly far off from working. It's hard for me to say which direction would work for starsector, but reducing the base officer count and distributing more via skills (unlocking officer slots from combat skills anyone?), maybe having minor fleet bonuses on existing combat skills when taken by the player, maybe even giving the player a different combat skill pool than officers would be good here.
By the way, hull restoration might be my favorite skill in the game, it's a huge upgrade to the gameplay experience. It's always been annoying to me how AI are really stupid and frequently get your assets killed by random chance (did two friendly paragons really need to sandwich hug my shrike to death?) The actual credits cost of losing frigates, destroyers and other smaller ships this way was always dwarfed by the annoyance factor of having to find or order replacement ships and refit them. For big ships, the cost of dock restoration always being higher than the hull cost of the ship itself is also an issue (though losing them is way rarer), sure i could go find a new one instead of restoring this one, but that is such a drag on gameplay and the fun factor. Story point upgrades on ships help us not lose them as well now which is another neat addition, but hull restoration just helps me not care when an AI piloted ship suicides in some ridiculous way, which makes me want to play campaigns for much longer without getting bogged down in that feeling of tedium from attrition managing a late-game fleet.
Happy 420th post
